


Touch

by xantissa



Series: Carnival of Rust [33]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Outtakes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 10:40:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6002806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xantissa/pseuds/xantissa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During one pod-retreval missions things go bad. Just an outtake from an unwritten chapter. Spock experiences a mind meld with what he thought was the worst of the augments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea when in the series this will happen, if it will go into the main one or be added to the missing scenes. I wanted his encounter be extremely sensual while being completely platonic.
> 
> An2: I am taking abreak from this series until I finish the Naruto fic because it has eaten my brain. Writing going slow because of ridiculous amounts of work, too. But I will finish this, I promise.

The base shuddered again under the assault, the walls groaning 

Spock was lying in a rapidly growing pool of green blood, McCoy kneeling beside him and working with grim determination. The CMO didn’t even curse, his hands rapidly moving between the tricorder and the tiny laser he was using to cauterise blood vessels in the huge hole in Spock’s chest.

The Vulcan was still conscious, his face grey and tense from the pain. Uhura knelt over his head, keeping it stable between her also bloody palms. She was crying silently, staring at her lover bleeding out.

“He’s losing blood too fast,” Bones muttered. “I can’t stop it. At this rate he’ll hemorrhage before I can close all the blood vessels!”

“Work faster!” Uhura snapped at McCoy, her voice catching oddly in the middle.

“I can’t!” Bones yelled at her. “In case you hadn’t noticed we're being fired on! I need a fully equipped Medbay not this puny laser! I need time!” Bones roared, frustrated and afraid.

Neither he nor Uhura noticed Scarlett suddenly walking towards them, and kneeling on the other side of Spock. She didn’t spare them any attention, her eyes locked on the Vulcan. She took hold of the hand closest to her and raised it a little.

“Do you want to live?” she asked the Vulcan directly, forcing him to look in her eyes.

He didn’t answer, the pain and shock of rapid blood loss too much for him, but she didn’t wait for him to anyway. Instead she raised his hand towards her face and set his fingers in the unmistakable positions.

“Mind meld with me,” she ordered with a soft yet unyielding voice. There was no pity in her, no urgency, nothing. He would either accept or reject her offer. 

Spock wanted to live though. As primitive as it seemed, he would grab any opportunity to raise his chances of survival, even if it was something he would be railing against otherwise. A mind meld was a very intimate act, something that should be done with full knowledge of the facts and possible repercussions. 

He had barely talked to Scarlett in the few weeks she’d been on board, couldn’t claim to know her, and definitely couldn’t say he trusted her. The woman had shown an odd interest in him, while she was nothing if not contemptuous towards anybody else, Augments included. She was known to scoff at Khan just as much as she did on humans. Therefore her sudden interest in Spock was been taken with a healthy dose of suspicion.

This time the Vulcan didn’t have time to consider the possible ramifications of such close contact with her. He was a telepath, she was psi null. In normal circumstances it would mean his overwhelming advantage.

But nothing about the Augments was normal. The wariness even other Augments showed Scarlett and Khan’s easy acceptance of her mental superiority over all of them made Spock suspicious and overly cautious. 

But there was no time for caution now. 

He was dying. 

With a burst of effort he lowered his shields and reached out for Scarlett’s mind. He had nothing to lose anymore.

As she was supposed to be psi null, he didn’t expect any shields. He was prepared to have to protect himself from her unguarded mind as to avoid learning too much of her private thoughts. 

He wasn’t prepared to fall.

* * *

“Spock?” Nyota called softly, noticing the way her lover stilled. She cast a look at him and only then noticed Scarlett kneeling beside Spock, the cloth of her pants soaking the blood slowly.

She looked at the hand Scarlett pressed to her face.

“What is going on?”

* * *

When he got a hold of himself again, he expected to be somewhere deep in her mind, a novice’s mistake someone as experienced as he should know how to avoid.

He was in a dark, silent place. He could sense Scarlett all around him, a quiet consciousness that felt surprisingly open to him. He could sense her thoughts somewhere just beyond his range, and realised she was welcoming him in at the same time as she separated him from her conscious mind. He could expect this from a telepath, but encountering this in a mind of a psi null being was…intriguing. 

Her mind was like nothing he’d ever seen before. It was brilliantly structured, clear to the point of transparency, a beauty of form a Vulcan would struggle to achieve their whole life with the help of meditation and telepathy. It wasn’t cold though. He sensed strong emotions threaded through every thought, every experience. There was joy, pain, disgruntlement, frustration and a deep sense of boredom and disillusionment. Her love for Khan shone through most clearly, but oddly enough there was anger, disappointment and contempt there too. Unlike anything he expected, these emotions didn’t cause conflict inside her. Among the warmer, easier memories he noticed darker places, ones that smelled overwhelmingly of darkness, pain and pure hatred. There was a myriad of feelings shining through every carefully stored memory; he even caught a whiff of her attraction to him and the sense of acceptance it carried with.

For a brief moment, he was intensely jealous of her ability to be so comfortable, so balanced in her logical, structured way of thinking, and the veritable storm of emotion raging inside.

She wasn’t talking to him, probably because she hadn’t yet learned how, but the things she’d already achieved just by the instinctual understanding of her own mind were…staggering. For the first time in his life he understood the human saying that just knowing something is not the same as experiencing it.

He could feel her inviting him deeper, opening a path for him. In the soft darkness he stood in, there was a tiny spot of light showing him the way.

Lost as to the purpose of this endeavour but curious, he went deeper.

* * *

“His vitals are falling,” Bones cursed as the tricorder peeped the warning at him. He raised his eyes from his work and noticed the odd tableau the Vulcan and two women presented. “What the hell?”

“It’s a mind meld. I just don’t know why,” Uhura said, torn between the wish to interrupt whatever was going on and hoping it would do some good. Some small, petty part of herself felt wounded that on his deathbed, Spock mind-melded with the other woman, not with her.

Bones quickly directed the tricorder at Scarlett.

“Her vitals are dropping, too.” He looked back to the device, now directed back at Spock. “But at least his heart rate calmed down.”

* * *

When he looked up again, he was on a beach. 

It was night. The light he’d seen before turned out to be a huge moon, hanging low in a perfectly starless sky. It was so quiet he could hear the gentle sound of water lapping at the shore. The water was so dark it seemed black, but he had the irrational feeling it would be cool and clear. It seemed to have no end, seamlessly joining the dark sky. The sand of the beach was so white it almost hurt his eyes.

The air smelled strongly of water and damp sand, that special green smell of water meeting land. The air was warm, damp, verging on uncomfortable. There was a distant sound of insects, of vegetation rustling in a gentle breeze. Before he realised what he was doing, he was already at the edge of the fine sand, the water kissing his bare feet.

He looked down, surprised to see his naked feet already submerged in the water. It was cool, and very pleasant, and the sensation almost managed to chase away the uneasiness caused by the fact that he should have been the only one capable of affecting his own perception in this plane.

A sound caught his attention. 

A splash.

He looked out at the water and saw movement in the moonlit darkness.

For the first time since he’d initiated the mind meld, coming into Scarlett’s mind, he actually encountered the woman.

She was coming to him out of the water. First he saw her head emerging from the dark waters with barely a ripple. Long, dark hair was plastered to her face, single strands falling over her face. As she came closer to the shore, he realised that the cascade of hair was hiding much more than just her face.

Underneath she was naked and it affected him in a strangely intense way. The long hair was thick enough and dark enough to hide everything obviously intimate, yet the knowledge of her nudity was enough to affect him.

She stopped moving when she was waist deep. Even here, in her own mind, she stood tall and proud, so very sure of herself and her place.

As beautiful as this place was, it felt lonely, too.

Spock wondered about the temperature of the air, the wonderful coolness of the water, the taste of green on his tongue, the way he experienced this landscape with all his senses. She must have an incredible sense memory along with her eidetic memory, to recreate the landscape to such incredible detail.

“This is not a place for hiding,” she said quietly. The water carried her voice to him easily. “If you truly want to live, come to me with no barriers.” She reached a hand to him.

This time he didn’t hesitate. He entered the water.

By the time he was waist deep in the inky depths, he thought his clothes away, letting the cool water caress his naked skin. he could feel the tiny currents touching him, the way the small hairs on his body bent and flowed along with the water, could smell and taste it.

Her pale gold eyes were clear and calm when he was close enough to see her clearly now. He could smell the warm scent of her skin, the tiny tang of sweat on her body, could feel the way the water was warmer where it first touched her and took away some of her body heat.

“Lie on the surface of the water. Relax,” she said as she moved behind him, completely unselfconscious in her nakedness, both literally and metaphorically. He saw her body and her mind bared to him, yet it was he who was floundering here.

He could feel her hand on the back of his neck as he lowered himself in the water, the cool liquid touching his overheated skin. He hadn’t realised how much his chest burned until the water took away the pain.

He exhaled sharply, feeling Scarlett’s warm palms slide from the nape of his neck, carding gently through the short hair there, before settling firmly on his shoulder.

“Feel it,” she ordered gently, letting her hands touch his chest through the thin layer of moving water. Her palms, barely warmer than the water, were somehow the only thing he could focus on.

It was so peaceful here. The sound of moving water, the distant, gentle sound of rustling plants he couldn’t see, and the coolness of the water. And her palms, sliding over his wet skin with slow deliberateness, chasing away even the faintest memory of pain. Her hand moved from his shoulders, down his chest to his stomach and then back up again. Over and over again, until he was both utterly relaxed and sensitized.

He never knew that a mind could be this calm, this balanced, this peaceful.

It was beautiful.

By the time she stopped moving her hands, he was lying on the water, more than half-asleep, barely aware of even having a body, yet at the same time completely at ease with it.

“It’s time.”

With that, her palms alighted on his chest once again, the skin tingling from the contact, and she pushed, submerging him.

He didn’t fight at all as the black cool water closed over his head.

* * *

“The bleeding is slowing down. I might even get a chance to patch him up before he bleeds out at this rate!” Bones shouted, watching the readings on his tricorder. “Uhura, assist me. I don’t know how much time we have.”

“What is she doing to him? Is she healing him?”

“No,” Bones explained. “It looks as if he is slowing down his body’s functions. It’s something we all do to a certain degree, during rest, or sleep. But what they are doing…is extreme. Right now I’m reading less than one heartbeat per three minutes! And his higher brain functions are…too weak for the tricorder to actually pick up.”

“Then how can you be sure he’s still in there?” Uhura asked with uncharacteristic fear.

Bones didn’t look up from his work, doing his best to patch Spock up as fast as he could.

“If he was brain dead, he wouldn’t be able to keep up the mind meld, now would he?”

* * *

"Is he going to survive?"

Bones breathed out, long and loud. Exhausted.

"Yes."

* * *

Spock opened his eyes to the harsh light of Enterprise Medbay and Nyota sitting beside his bed, her head pillowed beside his hip on the bed, hair in disarray, spilling over the white sheets.

On the bed next to him was Scarlett, her face grey and cheeks sunken in, looking as bad as he felt. His arm was stretched out towards her face, fingers hurting from keeping the meld position for so long.

He pulled back his hand, wincing at the protesting muscles and laid his hand against Nyota's head, waiting for her to wake up.

It seemed there were a lot of things about the Augments he hadn't considered. A lot of erroneous conclusions he made, blinded by his dislike and distrust.

The end.


End file.
